Not that the men weren’t sufficiently alarming in their own right. Lumpy Jock was tall and slow and much too big. His black hair was coated with wet light. Even though he said little, his mouth remained open at all times, the tongue idling on the lower teeth. It was hard to tell how much danger Jock contained. His companion, who went by the name of Trev, was an altogether more effective-looking unit. He was small and hard, packed tight into his clothes; he gave off a freckled, caramel sheen all over his body, a sheen just like his smell; and his hair was dirty orange with a nimbus of yellow where it caught the light. Trev was much closer to Mary than Jock was, and seemed intent on getting closer still. They both had an air of defiant self-neglect. And all their eyes were like Sharon’s eyes.
‘Where’d you get this one?’ said Trev, his breath playing on Mary’s cheek. His voice had a special upward lilt, not unpleasant in itself.
‘On the site,’ said Sharon.
‘Where she from?’ he pursued.
‘Yeah, where you from, Mary!’ said Sharon.
Mary felt heat scatter across her face. She wished she knew whether it was safer to reveal her fear or to keep it hidden.
‘See?’ said Sharon. ‘She doesn’t bloody know! You’re simple, aren’t you love?’
Mary looked up. Sharon’s face was expanding with new men and new drink. This was her victory. Mary knew she would get no help from her now.
‘Look at her,’ said Trev seriously. He paused. ‘Look at her. She’s like a fucking film star,’
‘See?’ said Sharon. ‘She’s worth a tenner of anybody’s money. Go on, Trev. I’ve cleaned her up and everything for you. You said you would last time. With Janice you said you would.’
‘Don’t start talking to me about no tenners, Shar,’ said Trev. ‘Don’t talk to me about no tenners.’
‘Janice was a right slag,’ said Jock in his gurgly voice.
‘That’s what I mean!’ said Sharon. ‘Mary, now she’s something special. Say something, Mary. Go on, say something for the boys.’
‘Does she fuck?’ said Jock.
Sharon’s head jerked round towards him. (Do I fuck? thought Mary. Well, do I?) ‘Of course she does!’ said Sharon indignantly. Mary was quite pleased that Sharon was still sticking up for her. But then Sharon leaned forward and said to Trev, ‘She’s simple. She won’t mind. You can do what you like with her.’
Mary felt Jock’s breath veer closer again—ripe moist breath almost condensing on her cheek, its questions forming like sticky droplets.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Mary.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Young.’
‘Where you living?’
There.’
‘Oh you’re living there, are you. And what day of the week is it?’
Mary smiled.
‘What’s two and two?’
Mary smiled.
‘And you got no man to look after you?’ ‘I—
‘You fucking beautiful, you know that? Hey Jock,’ he said, without redirecting his voice or his eyes, ‘I said she fucking beautiful, Sharon you can pick them I tell you that. Listen Mary now. We have some whisky and they shut here and we go to Jock’s and I fuck you to kingdom come. What a that?’
Mary shrugged and said yes. Behind her, in paroxysms of authentic disgust, a machine hawked money into its metal trough. ‘Time,’ shouted an old man wearily, gathering glasses as he moved among them. ‘Time. Time.’
• • •
Trev and Jock are criminals, I’m afraid. They make their living by doing things so risky and depressing that hardly anyone else can bear to do them. It’s all about money, of course, like so much else. Mary doesn’t really know about money yet.
Jock, for instance, had worked out as a lad that the best way of getting money was to attack weak people who already had some. Which weak people? He divided them into four categories: weak young men, weak young girls, weak old men and weak old ladies. After a few outings he satisfied himself that old ladies were the weakest and therefore the best people to attack. (They seemed to mind less too, probably because they hardly ever had any money.) His police record soon became a sorrily monotonous rollcall of decked grannies. Jock would run up to these people, hit them as hard as he could, and try to run away again with their money. The trouble was that even the oldest of them seemed determined not to part with their handbags; Jock hated the way he had to fidget through the leathery crevices with their sparkling dead make-up while the old ladies shrieked at him in that self-satisfied way they had. Sometimes he just hit them as hard as he dared and, breathing very sharply, hung around until he felt it was all right to run away— which he did with great skill, running really very fast. He was good at that bit. When times were low and Jock was recalling his few successes in life, his eyes would often fill with tears of pride at the thought of his swiftness at such moments.
Trev is different, his twin passions being drink and fighting. He doesn’t know why he keeps doing all the terrible things he keeps doing. Sometimes he attributes it to the coruscating hatred he feels for everyone he doesn’t know. But he hates everyone he does know too, so it can’t just be that. Like all true heroes Trev has a tragic flaw: he isn’t especially good at fighting, whereas he affirms and in fact believes that the opposite is the case. Accordingly, he keeps starting fights, fights that other people keep finishing. But he wins the fights he has with women, and he has quite a few of those.
I hope Mary will be all right. It’s a great shame, to say the least, that she had to get taken up by such people at this early stage. She just isn’t equipped to deal with them yet. Furthermore, show me criminals, and I’ll show you policemen, not far behind. And the last thing we want is to have Mary tangle with them.
• • •
With Jock squiring Sharon, and with Trev at Mary’s side, they walked up a steep passage, so narrow that the buildings on either side seemed to be brushing foreheads to keep each other up. Mary was surprised by the way they had paired off. She thought they would be paired in colours. Sharon and Trev were the same ginger, after all, and Mary was as dark as Jock. But they had been paired by size, and Trev was small and firm, like herself. Sharon and Jock were brushing foreheads too; they explored the deep shadows together while, a little way back, Mary walked with ginger Trev’s ginger arm pressed tight over her dark shoulders. He was making sure she wouldn’t get away. At one point Jock and Sharon twirled off further into the night (raising their voices together in a weird wail so that the others could keep track) and Trev slammed Mary up against a wall and tried to cover her mouth with his. Mouths again, you see. His was as private as hers; it contained much wetness and bad air. Her mouth, all on its own, made several attempts to slide out from under his, causing Trev’s arms to tighten round the back of her neck. And his mouth, which was alive, kept sliding after hers. Mary was getting the idea now; but she still wasn’t sure about the kind of harm Trev intended to do to her.
‘Don’t say I don’t look after you,’ said Sharon haughtily, glancing back as she descended some crackly stone steps.
Mary—who, incidentally, was going to say no such thing—stood and blinked at the sunken building. Abruptly she saw herself, behind a hurriedly shut door, crying naked on her knees. She felt Trev’s urging pressure on her shoulders. He almost had her where he wanted her now.
‘Come on, Mary,’ he said. ‘This is it.’
Mary bent her head and continued down the steps.
Later, when she tried to reassemble the parts of that stretched night, she found that it came back to her in hot thudding pockets of image and heartbeat … A dark and rancid room with a square veil of milky light on the wall. Heavy brown bottles swilled from hand to hand and white nuts that the others swallowed. Sharon standing up, falling over, hopping on one foot, pulling clothes over her head with an electric crackle, subsiding again in careless laughter with Jock behind a screen. Then Trev’s slow attack. She couldn’t tell what he wanted, she couldn’t work out what he wanted. ‘Loosen up. I said loosen up’ he said. He was testing, testing, probing her skin in search of its openings. If she had known what he wanted she might have struggled less. He hit her twice across the mouth early on. She thought that was part of it. She heard the methodical grunting from behind the screen. She tried to drain her body of all its powers of resistance. She started to understand. His two wet red points wanted to get as close as they could to her, to get inside. His two tongues wanted her two mouths. I can bear this, she thought; but there was more. He spread her a different way, on her side with her legs splayed. He started preparing something very complicated in the nexus of her body. She bit her hand to put the pain off centre. This was new all right, this was more. It reminded her of something, even then: squatting on the garage floor, a bottle still creaking on its axis, Impy looking on and Sharon saying that everybody did it. Trev laughed and said, ‘You dirty bitch, you’ve done this before, ooh you’ve done this before.’ Mary couldn’t believe she had done this before: she knew she never wanted to do it again. Suddenly his body snapped tight and she felt a foul snarl over her shoulder. Then he sank down sideways, out and away from her. ‘Wake me in an hour,’ he said. ‘With your tongue.’